Future Craft Collective Mission:

The future craft collective is about inspiring children to get crafty, to create beauty, while simultaneously teaching them ways of minimizing our impact on this earth. It's about understanding ways of recycling, reducing, reusing, and at the same time, making some really cool stuff.

Throughout the craft sessions, kids will discover ways to create a world in which the belief in handmade looms larger than the messages of the marketing machine. In this era of relentless advertising and planned obsolescence, the time has come to infuse our children with our own messages of creative living and sustainability. This message too can save a kid from a lifetime of seeking contentment through consumption.

The future craft collective wants kids to understand the thrill of making it themselves. We want them to look at the used goods all around them not as trash, or as items to be tossed in the recycling bin, but rather as raw materials in their crafty creative pursuits, thereby allowing them to experience the innovative feeling of instilling new life into old objects.

From the idea, to the completion of a project, to showing it off in public, we can teach children to recognize the value and pride and indeed the thrill in saying "Thanks, I made it myself." And the even greater thrill of utilizing old-fashioned ideals of resourcefulness and ingenuity and of finding the hidden life in abandoned materials.

in addition to making some really cool things we'll cover:

-why is there so much? understanding that less is more.

-what are retailers doing to the value of handmade?

-the pride of making it yourself.

-the joys of creating personal style.

-the value in knowing the ability to create is within his/her realm.

-tapping into a kids' inherent desire to create.

-recognizing the marketing machine of a consumer culture.

-spreading the love and celebrating the thrill of handmade.

Each session stands alone with a lesson in sustainability and a hands-on project, which will lead to a greater understanding of the thrill of consciously crafting. A follow-up discussion of each project will lead to greater understanding of the thrill of handmade, the need to minimize the impact and the necessity of creating rather than consuming.

Monday, May 26, 2008

Don't Shop: Swap

That's the working title of the big family clothes swap we're planning for back to school time. It'll be modeled after the Swap-a-rama-rama that was so incredible at the Maker Faire last fall. We'll have piles of sorted clothing and dressing rooms and manned sewing machines lining the perimeter of the room. Clothes can be doctored, altered, revised or heck, even fused. Ms. Teresa Ponzhoa has offered up the gym at Zilker for our use and it's going to be fantastic. It'll be on that ridiculous tax-free shopping day when they somehow convinced all of society that they can save money by shopping. Huh? It's mission will be to help people realize that they don't need to go buy a bunch of new clothes when there are already a ton of really great clothes out there just searching for the right body to wear them. And that consumption of new stuff doesn't make you feel good. It's making your own style that makes you feel good.

Stay tuned. And remember, you heard it here first. Or maybe not. Maybe you heard from me because I've been telling EVERYONE. Even though it was really Kathie's brainstorm.

read about and jump into our crafting family goodness adult classes here

where are we?

we are currently offering classes in austin, tx- but watch out! plans to expand the collective are underway and may just be coming to a town near you. sign up for our mailing list to stay in the loop!!!

who are we?

The future craft collective is brought to you by Kathie Sever and Bernadette Noll. Kathie is an accomplished seamstress and mother of two who left the world of fashion mass production to pursue the more sustainable idea of creating custom western wear, each piece fabricated after extensive interviews and artistic consult with each client. Bernadette Noll is a freelance author and mother of four. She resisted most inclinations towards sewing untill her mid thirties when she took a sewing class from a neighbor. It changed her life completly.

It is a goal of theirs to nurture a love of handmade in their own children, and to encourage them to tread lightly on this earth by valuing second hand, and injecting new life into old materials.